Douglas Houston (Douglas Norman Houston) Biography

British poet, born in Cardiff, educated at the University of Hull. Sixteen of Houston's poems appeared with work by other Hull poets in Douglas Dunn's anthology A Rumoured City (1982). Peter Porter described him as ‘an Auden-like artificer of great accomplishment’. With the Offal Eaters (1986) and The Hunter in the Snow (1994) are among his collections of poems. Houston's poetry is frequently characterized by the tensions established between succinctly defined social settings and the radically fictional nature of the situations and personae which emerge. Such strategies involve a range of effects extending from the grotesquely humorous to the sombrely elegiac. His work is featured in Poetry with an Edge (1988, edited by Neil Astley) and in Meic Stephen's edition of The Bright Field (1991), a selection of notable work produced since 1965 by Anglo-Welsh authors.